The Age of Hyperbole
Mbongeni Mguni | Wednesday April 15, 2026 10:46
In an age where attention directly generates revenue, hyperbole becomes the tool of the trade that influencers use to get ahead.
For the seedier players in the industry, hyperbole is the viscous fluid they use to grease the flim-flam machines they run around the clock on various social media platforms.
Hyperbole, or wilful exaggeration, is easier to demonstrate than spend many words describing. Just click on YouTube, the reels section of Facebook or Instagram or any social media platform which features continuous scrolling.
Content creators and influencers, which are essentially the players actively participating in the attention economy for profit, have evolved from the classic click and rage bait. A few years ago, they would try and grab attention with captions such as “you’ll never believe” or “watch until the end to see”.
Today, most posts and videos feature captions prefixed by phrases such as “the most” “the best” “the worst” “the deadliest” “the scariest”.
One of my favourite social media stars is Noel Philips, a US-based aviation content creator. In recent weeks, he has featured videos such as “I flew to America’s most remote island territory,” “I flew to the world’s least visited island,” “I took the world’s most expensive regional jet flight” and “15 hours on the world’s longest Boeing 747 flight”.
The thing about the attention economy is that it is a highly dynamic industry where something that worked yesterday can become absolutely reviled or mocked overnight. Because the industry depends on triggering and then keeping people’s attentions, it relies on the most changeable and fragile of human capacities – mental stimulation.
People switch off, zone out, drown out, adapt to and block triggers to their attention every minute of every day simply because there is an actual mental cost to the simple act of paying attention. The number of variables involved in the process by which someone chooses to spend 30 seconds and more on a single post, is something even the most advanced Artificial Intelligence struggles to predict.
Classic mass communication theory speaks of the encoder of a message, the medium of transmission and the audience, as the essential elements of communication. How effective that communication is, or put another way, the extent to which the audience reacts in the way desired by the encoder, depends on a plethora of factors.
For content creators, the bar is set much lower. They don’t need to care how the audience reacts or behaves. As long the audience clicks and interacts, then the encoder has done enough.
They have a bag of tricks to get this attention and in the attention economy, hyperbole is at the top. Content creators will also make their posts and videos more vivid in terms of colour and use tools such as search engine optimisation in social media which highlights keywords, hashtags and others to make one’s posts appear ahead of others.
Does the hyperbole always work though?
“Psychological research highlights the role of emotion-label words (which directly indicate emotional states) and emotion-laden words (which evoke emotional responses through associations) in shaping user interactions with content,” reads a study from the Guangdong University of Technology.
“Although both word types can trigger emotional effects, studies have shown conflicting results regarding which type is more effective in cognitive processing, with some suggesting emotion-label words have an advantage and others favouring emotion-laden words.”
In essence, hyperbole is associated with using emotion-label or emotion-laden words to elicit attention. Grabbing someone’s attention and keeping it, even if for a minute, can be big bucks for those in the attention economy.
Last year, Facebooks says it paid content creators nearly $3 billion in 2025, a 35% increase from the previous year and its highest annual total ever. That figure could pay Botswana’s 2026-27 deficit comfortably and leave P14 billion in change for other expenditure items!
For Facebook’s popular reels platform, every second literally counts. The social media giant uses metrics which include Qualified View, Earnings Rate and Non-Qualified View, where the amount the content creator earns depends on how long users spending watching and how much they engage with the reel.
Facebook estimates that the number of creators earning more than $10,000 annually on its platform has grown by over 30% year-over-year.
“The ability to monetise a variety of content formats is opening doors for creators everywhere, enabling those without large production resources to turn their creative work into a full-time career or a rewarding side hustle,” the social media titan says.
The temptation is certainly clear, especially to the tech and content-savvy Gen Zs for whom social media is second nature. A generation of young Batswana are already pushing their content, without monetisation on social media, receiving encouragement for their rapidly improving quality and professionalism.
Government, through the Sports and Arts ministry, has promised to fast-track engagements with Facebook and others to enable monetisation for local creators.
The kids are happy, the social media titans are happy? Everything is good! Right?
Researchers say the use of hyperbole as the currency of the attention economy has real-world harm on both the content creators and their audiences.
When emotion-labels such as “most” “best” “worst” “deadliest” are attached to everything, all the time, on even the mundane, there is a desensitisation or deadening that occurs. Because many of the target consumers are young, there is also a more worrying detachment of fact from hype that occurs.
“Many people spend quite a bit of their waking hours online and for young people in urban Botswana, this may up to 60 or 70 percent of their waking hours. “There’s a mental overstimulation that comes with going online where everything is a hyperbole, where’s there’s a crisis around every corner and all content is presented as being the most drastic version of itself,” said a local veteran journalist, who specialists in mass communication theory.
American psychiatrists, in a study released in February, noted that for adolescents, the dangers to mental health were not just about the duration of time spent online, but the type of content they interacted with.
“How they emotionally engage with digital interactions appears far more predictive of psychological well-being. “Adolescents most commonly browse appearance-focused content (e.g beauty, fitness, lifestyle influencers), peer-generated social content, short-form entertainment videos, and algorithmically curated feeds that prioritise emotionally salient material. “Exposure to idealised images and appearance-based feedback has been consistently linked to heightened social comparison, body dissatisfaction, and internalising symptoms, particularly among girls. “Patterns such as passive consumption, night-time engagement with emotionally arousing content, and exposure to peer conflict or cyberbullying are further associated with sleep disruption, mood disturbance, and increased risk for depression and anxiety,” the study noted.
On the other end of the line, content creators often collapse under the pressure of producing new, attention-grabbing material, not just every day but often many times a day in the attention economy. High levels of depression and even self-harm have been reported within the attention economy where young content creators find themselves under immense pressure to not only deliver, but keep up their subscriber numbers, which are directly linked to their incomes.
“This is also part of the reason why you find that hateful, explicit and abusive content begins to gain momentum on social media, because it’s not only easier to generate, but also tends to get a lot of attention, generating revenue,” the journalist said.
The attention economy that Batswana are eager to break into holds the promise of billions. But for some, the question is: at what cost?